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Smooth s-cobordisms of elliptic 3-manifolds.
Geometry/Topology| Speaker: | Weimin Chen, Tulane |
| Location: | 693 Kerr |
| Start time: | Wed, Jun 9 2004, 2:10PM |
Building on Freedman's work on 4-dimensional topological surgery, the classification of topological s-cobordisms of elliptic 3-manifolds was completed by Cappell-Shaneson and Kwasik-Schultz by the late 1980's. Their results showed particularly that there are nontrivial topological cobordisms of elliptic 3-manifolds. On the other hand, virtually nothing is known about smooth s-cobordisms. In particular, it is not known whether there are exotic smooth s-cobordisms, or if any of the nontrivial topological s-cobordisms is smoothable. In this talk, I will discuss some ideas of dealing with these questions via symplectic/ contact topology.
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